Things By Simonhttp://www.thingsbysimon.com
Behind the scenes with an international illusionistWed, 07 Feb 2018 18:06:12 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3The Slushening: A Roughly 50% True Storyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/Ft7gsdQZnVA/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/theslushening/#respondWed, 07 Feb 2018 13:45:55 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=2065Sodium Polyacrylate (known as “slush powder” in the magic industry) is a white powder that can absorb up to 300 times its own weight in water. Half a teaspoon is enough to solidify a large glass of water, tranforming it into a spongy mass with a texture somewhere between jello and snow. It’s a fairly …

]]>Sodium Polyacrylate (known as “slush powder” in the magic industry) is a white powder that can absorb up to 300 times its own weight in water. Half a teaspoon is enough to solidify a large glass of water, tranforming it into a spongy mass with a texture somewhere between jello and snow.

It’s a fairly niche magic item, being used by maybe 5-10% of magicians worldwide, but it does have a few useful theatrical applications (beyond making slightly rubbery fake snow) that keep it stocked in magic shops for about $10 per four-ounce container. One such container could easily last a slush-powder-using magician several months.

On January 19th, Terry Runyon, Magic Castle member, made a post on the hidden Magic Castle members-only Facebook group:

“In my day job I am an automation engineer. I design and build machines for factories. I just built a machine for a company that mixes slush powder with other powders. They use 5,000 pounds a week. They tried a bag from a different company but they can’t use it because it changes the the formulation with the other powders. They asked me if I can get rid of it for them. I have a 1,000 pound bag of slush powder. I am filling boxes with pounds of powder. I will have boxes piled up in my living room until I find someone who wants some. I come to the Castle about every other Saturday night. I can bring some to anyone who wants a box or two. It’s free. I just want to get it out of my living room.”

The response was explosive. Dozens of replies flooded the thread, with magicians eager to get in on what was realistically a free lifetime supply. Of the magic castle’s roughly 5,000 members, even the 5-10% who cared about slush powder represented a huge number of people. As the responses continued to flow in, Terry adapted to the demand.

“I am packing it in to boxes. They weigh 30 pounds. I will be at the Castle at 5pm Saturday for anyone who wants to pick them up. Let me know.”

Dozens of members replied in the affirmative. The thread had now grown to over 130 replies: a mix of requests, jokes, and people finding the situation so surreal that they wondered if the entire thing was a joke. Terry continued to respond.

“I am still filling boxes. I have about 40 boxes and 30 jars filled. This bag seems to have no end.”

On Friday night at the Magic Castle, the number one topic of conversation was the slush powder extravaganza scheduled for the next day. Even people with no interest in the powder itself were fascinated by the sheer absurdity of the situation. Members considered turning up just to bear witness to it. Employees worried about the logistical impact on Castle operations. Everyone made jokes about magicians being mistaken for cocaine dealers, and turning entire swimming pools into lumps of semi-solid gel.

At 4:50pm on Saturday, Terry pulled up to the Magic Castle in a large and suspicious looking panel van filled with cardboard boxes of white powder. He parked at the far end of the Castle’s large open air parking lot, and started unloading.

The magicians gathered. While each could have just grabbed their box of slush powder and left, everyone sensed on some level that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and wanted to linger and watch it play out. Plus, the now vast array of cardboard boxes that Terry had laid out on the asphalt around his van was so hilariously impressive that it seemed a shame to disrupt it. Much like a cake that looks too pretty to eat, the crowd wanted to enjoy the visual of a mountain of boxed slush powder – a substance normally only seen in 4oz jars – for a moment before dismantling it.

– – – – – – – –

Meanwhile at the LA bureau of meteorology, intern Kevin Wilson watched the weather radar. LA was a dull place to be posted, what with the city being legendary for its temperate – and hence, from a meteorological viewpoint, thoroughly boring – weather.

Today was unusual though. As Kevin watched, a narrow but incredibly rapid low pressure front moved southward across California. It wasn’t extreme enough to warrant flagging it in the system, but it was rare to see a cold front moving that quickly. As it passed Simi Valley at an almost but not quite record-breaking thirty miles per hour, he noticed idly that its front edge was almost perfectly parallel to the Hollywood Hills.

Kevin mused about how if California had more low pressure fronts like this, it wouldn’t have such chronic drought problems. As he did so, the front crested the hills and collided with the clouds above Hollywood. Even with a sky as grey as this one, nobody in LA ever expected rain.

– – – – – – – –

The first few drops barely even registered with the crowd. By the time a few of the assembled magicians had held out their hands and looked up at the sky puzzledly, the flash downpour had already begun.

Being LA residents and hence experiencing rain as a rare novelty, the crowd was so caught up in reacting to the unexpected wetness that it was several seconds before anyone thought about the slush powder. Those several seconds were long enough for a few raindrops to slip between the hastily and imperfectly sealed box flaps and be rapidly absorbed.

Local magician John Wilcox was the first to notice the beginnings of slush blobs blossoming from a few of the least adequately sealed boxes. “Oh shit! Move the powder!” he shouted, as everyone suddenly realised the magnitude of their oversight. Fifteen magicians immediately scrambled to try and move forty thirty-pound boxes under cover as quickly as possible. However, three things got in their way.

Firstly, there wasn’t much cover to move to. Terry had already locked his van, and wasn’t standing close to it when the downpour began. Hence it was fifteen valuable seconds before he could reach the van door, retrieve his keys, and get the thing open to be frantically reloaded with boxes that were now oozing expanding slush gel from every edge.

Secondly, in a spirit of helpfulness, Terry had laid out the boxes in a corner of the parking lot, to keep out of the way of the valet team and other guests. This meant that the array of boxes was flanked on two sides by walls, and on a third by parked cars. Of the fifteen magicians present, only a handful could access the bottleneck at a time.

Thirdly, junior magician Ryan Schafer didn’t know how to lift a cardboard box properly. He bent at his waist rather than his knees, lifted the box all the way up to his shoulders rather than just his hips, but worst of all he grabbed the box by its top flaps rather than its base. As he yanked the box far higher than necessary above the ground, his body soaked with both rain and panic-induced adrenaline, the cardboard flaps gave way. The rain-soaked box fell five feet to the ground and burst open, exploding in what was extremely briefly a cloud of dry powder.

Its surface area now fully exposed, it only took four seconds for Ryan’s box of powder to absorb several hundred times its weight in water. This translated to a growing slush blob roughly fifty times the size of the original box. Ryan and the other magicians reflexively jumped back from the rapidly expanding blob, escaping with only mildly slushed pant legs in the process.

The pressure of the expanding blob, while not high, was enough to push apart the already soaked cardboard boxes next to it. These in turn expanded, unleashing a slush powder chain reaction that began to engulf the nearby cars. By now the rainfall was in full torrential mode, providing more than enough water to keep the mountain of slush growing. The magicians could do nothing but retreat in awed, soaked, semi-slushed horror.

By the time the storm passed, the slush pile was twenty feet in diameter and had engulfed Terry’s van, another six cars, and a decent chunk of the parking lot wall. One particularly nice BMW was visible only by its roof and radio antenna, poking up like a periscope from the greyish slush mass. Fortunately for the clean-up crew, and the members that were eventually indicted by the Castle’s ethics and grievances committee, none of the cars had had their windows open. Slush powder is relatively easy to clean off smooth surfaces, and nothing was permanently damaged. It still took three days though.

A week later, once normal operations had finally resumed, and tales of “The Slushening” had spread far and wide through the entire Magic Castle community, Terry made another post on the members’ page.

“That didn’t go so great last week. Sorry for the trouble and thank you to everyone who helped out. I still have 400 pounds of powder left if people still want it. You have to come get it from my house though.”

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/theslushening/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/theslushening/Show Me The Moneyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/g0INkSb2tR4/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/showmethemoney/#respondWed, 31 Jan 2018 18:01:37 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1992I was offered a three month gig in Macau. I accepted it partly for the experience, partly for the stories, but mostly because I needed the money. During employee orientation, the company set us up with accounts at the Bank of China. We would be paid monthly into these accounts in Macanese Patacas, then could …

]]>I was offered a three month gig in Macau. I accepted it partly for the experience, partly for the stories, but mostly because I needed the money.

During employee orientation, the company set us up with accounts at the Bank of China. We would be paid monthly into these accounts in Macanese Patacas, then could transfer the money at will into our US accounts. Given that dealings with China are always a little hairy, I’d already asked around the underground magic network for people who had already done the gig. All reported that it had been fine. Checks had cleared, payments had been made, and everyone had transferred their money out without problems. I relaxed. This was my first mistake.

An employee liaison walked us through the account setup process at the Bank of China branch in the Casino itself. Forms were signed, passports were shown, and everything went smoothly. I set up a netbanking account and password, checked that I could sign in (since this would eventually be the medium via which I would transfer my money out to the USA), and all seemed good.

Since payday was monthly, my last payment would enter my account a couple of weeks after I left Macau. That was fine; the accounts remained our property for as long as there was money in them. We could transfer the funds any time via netbanking. Since each foreign transfer incurs a fee on top the exchange rate, I figured I would just wait until all the paychecks had cleared and then transfer the entire three months’ wages at once, thus saving on fees for multiple transfers. This was my second mistake.

Before transferring a large sum between two bank accounts, it pays to first do a smaller test transfer. The additional transfer fee is more than worth the peace of mind to check that you have all the routing numbers and so on correct in the tangled mess that can be international banking. I fully intended to do that before I left Macau, but in the chaos of packing and preparation for departure, I never got around to it. That was my third and by far worst mistake.

Online Security

Two weeks later, back in sunny California, basking in the joys of democracy, I finally sat down to do my bank transfer. I went to the Bank of China website, and logged in. Or attempted to.

I couldn’t log in. Ok, no big deal. Maybe I forgot the password. Maybe the login name itself was wrong. All modern websites have a relatively simple password reset system, right? Right?

I followed the links on the site. The only information on login/password reset said to call the technical support phone number in Macau. I did so. I navigated through the nightmarish automatic phone menu, and finally reached the right extension. It was closed. The time zone difference had taken us out of Macau business hours. It took me several days to get the right time zone slot – I had a lot going on in LA at the time – and when I finally did… it was a bank holiday in Macau. I then had to fly to cruise ship gig the next day, which left me in international waters for a week and hence unable to make phone calls.

This cycle repeated a couple of times, until after several weeks I finally managed to get through. I explained to the tech support guy that I couldn’t log in to online banking. He confirmed – in semi-broken English – that I would need to reset my password, and that to do so I should come in to the bank in person with my passport as proof of identity. I explained that I was 8,000 miles away, and hence coming in was going to be difficult. He said I should come in when I’m back in Macau. I explained that that wasn’t going to happen for a while, if ever, and I would like to access my money before then. He then became confused and put me on hold. After apparently researching the Bank of China protocol for this inconceivable situation, he explained that the process for a remote password reset was for them to email me a form that I should print, sign, scan, email back, and then they would mail me a new password. Not email. Mail. In the post. From Macau to Los Angeles.

I guess they take security seriously.

They emailed me the form. I printed it, signed it, scanned it, and emailed it back to them. They replied saying that my signature didn’t match the one they had on file. I suddenly had a horrible flashback. Way back when opening the account, there had been a moment where the teller asked me to re-sign a form because it didn’t exactly match one I’d previously signed. I had looked at the first signature, noticed that oh yes, it did have a slightly wider loop on one letter. I re-signed accordingly, and didn’t think any more of it. Like most people, my signature varies a bit between individual writings. Nobody in the western world really pays that much attention. It turns out that the Chinese banking system, steeped in a cultural history of imperial seals, name stamps, and very precise calligraphy, feels differently.

I filled out a second form, signed it with more care and attention, scanned it, emailed it, and received another reply saying that it still didn’t match. I tried to think back to four months ago when I’d opened the account. I had absolutely no memory of how I’d signed the form. Was it my hasty scribbly signature that I do when in a rush? Or my more careful measured one that’s a bit more legible? Or, more likely, some indefinable hybrid that I had almost no chance of exactly recreating?

I tried a third form, with the same response. I started to try and think of other ways to access my money. I had an ATM/debit card, but soon learned that Chinese ATMs work on a completely different network than the normal Switch/Maestro system that most countries use. No good. I then had an idea. A quick Google search revealed that Bank of China has a Los Angeles branch. After multiple false starts with their equally nightmarish phone system, I finally made it through to a teller, who helpfully explained that Bank of China *Macau*, while owned by the same parent company, runs on a completely separate system of accounts and databases to Bank of China proper, and that there was nothing they could do to help me.

I started looking up prices for plane tickets to Macau.

Alternative Approaches

Over the next few months, which didn’t have any wide enough time windows for a theoretical Macau fight, I tried a few other things. I called Bank of China Macau again, trying to find another possible path to my funds, but ran into standard mindless Mainland Chinese bureaucracy. I tried calling my contact at the House of Magic, who was helpful and sympathetic, but unable to do anything to influence Chinese banking regulations. I tried my debit card in various brands of ATM, hoping maybe I’d find one that would work (and gradually withdraw the entire 3 months’ salary in innumerable multiples of the daily limit), but no dice. I tried every imaginable permutation of logins and passwords on netbanking, but by now my account had been locked out for suspected hacking.

Meanwhile, things were getting tight financially. Working on the assumption I’d be leaving Macau with three months of income saved up, I had budgeted accordingly for the rest of the year. I had committed to several show development projects that wouldn’t earn anything short term, but could potentially pay off hugely in the future. But as the months passed and the money stayed locked in the Bank of China’s vaults, I had to dip further and further into my savings to stay alive. By mid year I was starting to worry about being able to pay rent.

Then an opportunity arose.

A magician friend called me, asking if I could join him on a short notice 12-day creative consulting project in Beijing. Decent day rate, travel and accommodation provided, and as a secret side project it would get me to the right part of the world to finally take care of this increasingly Kafkaesque quest for my money. I took the gig.

We arrived in Beijing. I was now just a (relatively) short domestic flight from Macau. Before booking it though, I thought I’d at least try a Beijing Bank of China branch. Maybe being in the right country would help. I’d be there in person with my passport, able to prove my identity, and have them verify that to their very close sister division in Macau. After two hours in a bank branch on the phone to Bank of China Macau via a Bank of China Beijing employee in a mix of her very limited English and my even more limited Mandarin (while my project team waited for me to come back from this now suspiciously long lunch break), she finally spoke the words I’d been dreaming of.

“Yes, they can… do… password reset for you.”

My heart soared. At last. I wouldn’t have to fly to Macau. My much needed cash pile was in reach. It had all been worth it.

“Yes… they will… email you a form to sign, then you send it back.”

She looked so happy to have been of help to this hapless foreigner. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her how far I’d already gone down the “sign this form” road. I thanked her, left, and went back to the fly-to-Macau plan.

Beijing and Macau are about five hours apart by plane. With the work schedule we had in Beijing, there was exactly one free day that I could use. There was no room to extend the trip (due to a gig back in LA), so that one day was my only window. I looked at flights. If I left on the earliest morning flight and came back on the latest evening one, I would have… three hours in Macau. Three hours to get to the bank, deal with whatever insanity awaited there, get my money, get back to the airport, and get back to Beijing.

It was… theoretically possible. But it would also, it turned out, cost nearly as much money to get those flights as it would for an entire round trip from LA. If this were a movie, I would absolutely have taken the gamble, failed barely to make it back in time (thus giving even more weight to subsequent scenes), but after several minutes of very deep breathing, I decided that gambling on a three hour time window was just not worth it. I’d have to come back again, with enough time to make sure it got sorted properly.

Brute Force

Then, a couple of nights later, after several drinks, I said “fuck it,” grabbed a sheet of paper, and signed my name about thirty times in as many slightly different variations as possible. I scanned a copy of the password reset form in to Photoshop, scanned in the page of signatures, and generated a huge number of identical-except-for-the-signature-field forms.

I spend the next several days sending them to Bank of China IT support. The moment they replied that the signature didn’t match, I immediately sent the next form, and planned to continue doing so indefinitely. I hoped that either A) one of them might actually match, or B) the IT support team would be so worn down by the bombardment that they’d eventually see the ridiculousness of the situation and let me in.

Miraculously, (A) happened first. I was about to finally be mailed a new password. To avoid said password getting lost en route to Los Angeles via the moderately janky Macau postal system, I gave them the address of a close and fully trustworthy friend in Hong Kong.

(Side note: when you think of someone as “trustworthy”, there are really two separate components to that. There are plenty of people whose integrity I trust, but wouldn’t necessarily trust their effectiveness to get a weird but critical job done right. The reverse can be true as well: people I trust to get something done, while knowing full well they’re only doing it because their interests happen to align with mine, and they wouldn’t hesitate to screw me over if that weren’t the case. This friend in Hong Kong is one of the tiny handful of people I know who rates maximum on both trust scales. It’s good to know people like that.)

Final Boss

After a few days, said friend messaged me to say the letter had arrived. I told him to wait. We were about to send incredibly valuable banking information over the internet, and I wanted to leave the narrowest possible window for anything to be intercepted, hacked, phished, or otherwise screwed up. I sat down, Bank of China login page at the ready, and asked him to send me (via the securest encrypted messenger app we could find) photos of the letter.

First page: “Thank you for being a Bank of China customer. Here is your new temporary user ID and password. Once you’ve logged in, please change it to a new one immediately.”

At last, after all this time! I typed in the ID and password and hit Enter.

“Error: incorrect login.”

I retyped the ID and password, double checking that I’d matched the random string of letters and numbers correctly.

“Error: incorrect login.”

I then noticed that there was a photo of a second page of the letter.

“In order to activate this temporary password, please first sign the enclosed approval form, and send it back to us in the enclosed addressed envelope.”

I stared at the screen for a very long time. I looked over at my page of thirty or so signatures, and thought about the eight months it had taken to get to this far. Eight months of stress, frustration, and financial anxiety, banging my head against the walls of an irrational and implacable bureaucracy, only to stumble again at what had looked like the final hurdle.

I went back to my chat window and typed “How do you feel about signature forgery?”

Even if it had been me doing the signing, I would have carefully copied my own signature from the the form that they finally accepted (luckily I had kept track, and had a digital copy of the sacred matching signature close to hand). We discussed printing the signature digitally on to the form to make sure it matched flawlessly, but the paper was too flimsy to risk running through a printer. We discussed using a light bed to trace it precisely, but though flimsy the paper also had a security pattern on the back that let almost no light through.

In the end, my friend practiced a few times, did it freehand, and nailed it exactly. Trustworthy, in all the ways. A few days later I received an email from the bank, saying that my password was now active for use. It worked. I logged in, and did the small test transfer that I should have done way back before leaving Macau. It cleared after a couple of business days, and I logged back in to do the final transfer.

A few days after that, and slightly more than eight months after finishing the gig, I finally had the money.

TL;DR

In summary, I navigated probably the most arduous password reset in the history of IT security. If you ever go banking in China, please learn from my mistakes. Make your transfers early, and practice the hell out of your signature.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/showmethemoney/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/showmethemoney/Getting Shanghaiedhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/En075A3gwUA/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/shanghaied/#respondSat, 26 Aug 2017 20:52:30 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1954I was flying to a cruise ship gig. This was good. I had a one-night transit in Shanghai. This was less good. Sure it sounds fine. Shanghai! A big exciting cosmopolitan city! Even if you get in late and have to leave early, surely it’d be a fun chance to grab dinner or a drink. …

]]>I was flying to a cruise ship gig. This was good. I had a one-night transit in Shanghai. This was less good.

Sure it sounds fine. Shanghai! A big exciting cosmopolitan city! Even if you get in late and have to leave early, surely it’d be a fun chance to grab dinner or a drink. Explore the city. At least go for a walk in an exciting and alien place. Problem is, my one night stopover was booked at the Shanghai Airlines Travel Airport Hotel (sic).

After getting through customs and immigration, I eventually tracked down the hotel shuttle. It was a small 12-seat minibus that looks like it was made in the 1970s. It had no driver, just a lone passenger playing a Chinese version of Candy Crush, and looking like he’d settled in for a long wait.

Eventually the driver arrived, wearing a leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. At least, I assume he was the driver. He climbed in to the van, and without a word began driving us on to a freeway.

The needle on my internal “am I being kidnapped?” dial started to rise a little. The bus continued down the long deserted freeway, apparently heading away from civilisation. I thought about my kidneys and how much I valued them.

We arrived at a hotel. It was in the middle of nowhere, but it was definitely the right place. My kidnap dial dropped back to standard background levels. I went to the check-in desk, and discovered that not a single person there spoke any English.

Now look. I’m not an imperialist wanker. I go to the effort of trying to learn the local language when travelling. I fully appreciate what an insanely difficult language English is to learn. However, you would think that an international airport hotel would hire at least ONE person who spoke ANY English at their check-in desk.

Luckily my Mandarin, while not fluent, is good enough to handle most basic interactions. I handed over my passport and booking confirmation. The check-in person frowned and said something I didn’t understand. Bringing up some kind of Communist-government-approved version of Google Translate on her phone, she hit some keys and showed me the phrase “booking is deleted.”

The booking had been made, and then subsequently cancelled. The written cancellation reason was the enigmatic and inacurate “GUEST IS ILL.” Having spent plenty of time in China, this random act of sabotage was wearying but unsurprising. I photographed the screen she showed me in preparation for the inevitable expenses debate later, and booked another room myself.

At this point I was ravenous, so I dumped my bags in the room and went to find food. Being in the middle of nowhere, the only option was the hotel restaurant. It was 8pm at this point, but the restaurant appeared to be closed: lights low, empty tables, and only one staff member visible, apparently doing admin work behind the counter.

After a brief conversation with her (in Mandarin; she too spoke zero English) it turned out the restarant was actually fully operational, just understaffed and eerily deserted. She gestured to a menu which did have English translations, alebit very minimalist ones.

Ordering from a mainland Chinese menu is a fine art. The English translations rarely reveal much about the dish other than the main couple of ingredients. You just guess, point, and hope to get something that isn’t made mostly of bone or intestinal tract. I managed to order a mystery-meat-free noodle dish, and ate it without seeing a single human in the roughly 100 seat restaurant other than that one staff member.

While eating, I realised that since the room booking had been randomly cancelled, I should double check that my shuttle to the ship the next day was still happening. The ship agent on the collect call emergency line to the USA was very helpful, confirmed there had been unexpected issues with the booking, arranged for a new shuttle, and said she would email me the details as soon as the Shanghai port authority confirmed them. I thanked her profusely for her helpfulness and hung up.

I then tried to check my email, and found that everything was blocked. I don’t know whether it was the Great Firewall of China or just the hotel having janky wifi, but email (along with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and any site that might expose The People of China to subversive ideas) was just not happening. It occurred to me that since email wasn’t working, Facebook was illegal, and my AT&T phone plan didn’t roam to China, it might be literally impossible to send me any kind of text documentation. Maybe we could Dropbox it?

I finally decided to call back in the morning, waking up with enough lead time to deal with whatever China-related issues would inevitably arise. Jetlag worked in my favour this time, and I woke up at 6am, called back, explained the situation, and transcribed by hand the thankfully-now-confirmed transfer details. At this point I was starving, and went downstairs.

The formerly deserted restaurant was packed. Hordes of people – mostly Chinese, with a few Westerners – swarmed over a buffet, featuring three types of congee, various fruits and vegetables, and “Western Pastries” that looked like what you’d get if you worked from a recipe without ever having seen the finished article before.

There were also these:

They were slighly damp, with a consistency somewhere between sponge and particle board. I ate the fruit.

The port shuttle arrived right on time. Like the hotel shuttle it also had a slightly kidnappy vibe, but at this point I’d calibrated my scale to China levels and barely even noticed. Half an hour later I was safely on the ship, and realised that if I didn’t write all this down it would blur into some weird half-remembered dream.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/shanghaied/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/shanghaied/La Cucarachahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/avg_ChLNRwk/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/la-cucaracha/#respondTue, 27 Jun 2017 07:50:22 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1946As I check in at Honolulu airport, I think about the live cockroach trapped inside my bag. Neither myself nor the cockroach are happy with the situation. Several hours earlier I’d been on a cruise ship, having just finished a week of shows there, and was hastily packing my suitcase before the airport shuttle arrived. The …

]]>As I check in at Honolulu airport, I think about the live cockroach trapped inside my bag. Neither myself nor the cockroach are happy with the situation.

Several hours earlier I’d been on a cruise ship, having just finished a week of shows there, and was hastily packing my suitcase before the airport shuttle arrived. The final unpacked item was a mesh bag of socks and underwear. I threw it into the suitcase. As it landed, a large cockroach, clearly having taken up residence in the past 24 hours and now startled by the sudden jolt, rushed out of the mesh bag and into the depths of the suitcase.

Over the years I’ve discovered that I’m only freaked out by insects above a certain body mass. If it’s smaller than a dime, it’s adorable. If it’s larger than a quarter, it’s goddamn terrifying. This one was well into half-dollar territory, and I reacted proportionately.

Having nowhere near enough time to unpack the bag, find a flamethrower, and deal with the cockroach accordingly, I zipped up the bag – extremely securely – thus deferring the problem until an indeterminate later date. Close proximity to the roach was fine, so long as I was in no danger of making contact with it.

In the drama of the multiple-hour journey from ship to airport, I completely forgot about the cockroach. At the airport however, going through customs, I noticed a large sign showing the vast number of different insects, worms, plants, and other living organisms that you should absolutely under no circumstances bring from Hawaii into the Continental USA.

I thought about saying something to the officials, but A) roaches weren’t on the list, B) I had no idea how to explain the situation, and C) experiences with airport security made me fear the nightmarishly surreal conversation that would likely ensue. The bag passed through the x-ray machine with its additional passenger undetected.

I’m now sitting in the departure lounge. My bag is on the plane. In about ten hours I’ll be back in my apartment in LA, and will have to make some choices. Specifically, to either:

Drop the entire bag into an industrial incinerator.

Wait three to five thousand years for the roach to die of natural causes.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/la-cucaracha/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/la-cucaracha/Three Months in Macauhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/T-moS8OEbbY/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/three-months-in-macau/#respondThu, 12 Jan 2017 16:28:20 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1933I’m writing this from my dressing room in Macau, which is also going to be my home for the next three months (mainly Macau, but to a large extent the dressing room too). I’m here on a contract with the House of Magic, a new $40 million custom-built magic venue in the Studio City hotel/casino. …

I’m writing this from my dressing room in Macau, which is also going to be my home for the next three months (mainly Macau, but to a large extent the dressing room too). I’m here on a contract with the House of Magic, a new $40 million custom-built magic venue in the Studio City hotel/casino.

The House of Magic is an unusual operation. It’s not a show so much as an interactive multi-show experience. It begins when the audience enter the foyer area (“The Lab”), which is decked out with all manner of magic-related artifacts. It’s also populated by The Illusioneer (me, for the next three months) who greets the crowd and performs magic with them for the first 25 minutes as they arrive.

The Illusioneer then gets up on to a raised platform, greets the crowd as a whole, performs a short larger-scale magic routine (including vanishing a member of the audience into a huge teleporter machine built in to the room), and briefs everyone on what’s going to happen next.

Specifically, the crowd now splits in half and files in to two separate 150-seat theatres. Each group watches a 15-minute magic show, and then swaps theatres to see the other show. Then the entire audience enters the final 300-seat theatre to watch the Franz Harary “Mega Magic” illusion stage spectacular, and exits through the gift shop.

The whole experience lasts about 90 minutes, and repeats three times per night. The acts rotate on 3-to-6 month intervals, and I’m contracted for the part of the Illusioneer until April 9th. So if you find yourself in Macau, you could do a lot worse than to come check out what I’m doing in one of the newest – and definitely the most expensive – magic venues in the world.

I was pretty trepidatious going in to this contract. It’s going to be a huge amount of work, in a relatively isolated environment, performing to a challenging culture mix (audience dynamics in Greater China can be very different to ones in the west), at a time when I was just starting to settle into life in Los Angeles.

However, it was also way too big an opportunity to pass up. It’s a chance to rack up an unmatched amount of performing experience, workshop a huge amount of material, and cash some solid regular paychecks in the tumultuous and sometimes highly unreliable world of professional showbiz.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/three-months-in-macau/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/three-months-in-macau/Magicans: Life in the Impossiblehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/5-5e9shI6l0/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magicans-a-life-in-the-impossible/#respondWed, 16 Nov 2016 02:57:23 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1882Last night I went to the premiere of the documentary Magicians: Life in the Impossible. I’ve witnessed this movie slowly come together over the past five years, and it was a vicariously cathartic experience to finally see it come to life on the big screen (Full disclosure: I personally know the directors and most of the cast. This …

]]>Last night I went to the premiere of the documentary Magicians: Life in the Impossible. I’ve witnessed this movie slowly come together over the past five years, and it was a vicariously cathartic experience to finally see it come to life on the big screen (Full disclosure: I personally know the directors and most of the cast. This is not an unbiased review.)

It’s a beautiful documentary. I say that very much as a subscriber to the adage that truth is beautiful. My own journey in magic was driven primarily by a desire to discover, understand, and share. I find it frustrating to have to keep secrets, and constantly look for chances to share as much of reality as I can.

This is the first movie I’ve ever seen that actually shows the truth of life as a magician, in all its glory, horror, and everything in between. Magic is a craft rarely associated with honesty, so it’s a rare pleasure to see a profoundly honest work associated with it. (The excellent Our Magic also achieves this, albeit via interviews rather than in-the-trenches documentary footage.)

The truth is frequently painful. Several people I know who have seen the documentary have described it as “depressing,” and to a degree I can see where they’re coming from. Being a professional magician can be an arduous journey. While the surface is often glamorous, the daily grind is usually anything but.

You never normally see this. It’s in most performers’ interests to project a facade of easy success, which makes it all the more admirable that the subjects of the movie – some more than others – were willing to let the camera show the less glamorous aspects that most people in showbiz keep carefully hidden.

My only lament is that the movie shows a very small sample of the different kinds of magical careers. Three of the four subjects are primarily gig-to-gig close up magicians. You don’t get to see, for example, the kids’ show magicians, the corporate speakers, the TV magic consultants, the comedy club workers, the cruise ship performers, and the blessed few magicians who have transcended the grind and are still working hard but living far more comfortably.

There is also, already, so much more to the stories than you see on screen. Several of the magicians depicted are now in life situations very different to what you would imagine from the way the movie ends (for one of them in particular, profoundly so). Stories are always more complex and layered than even a capable and well-intentioned director can capture.

All of this however, is completely forgivable when you consider the challenges of this kind of documentary. Even if it were three times as long and had full access to every magician on earth, it still couldn’t paint the whole picture. It captures some rarely-seen facets of the world of magic, and captures them with disarming and frequently hilarious honesty.

If you like magic because you enjoy fantasy, this isn’t the movie for you. Stick to the more whimsical Harry Potter, The Prestige, The Illusionist, or the highly questionable Now You See Me. But if you’re like me, and appreciate magic for what it is and what it can reveal – through studying deception, you can learn about reality – then I recommend Magicians: Life in the Impossible wholeheartedly.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magicans-a-life-in-the-impossible/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magicans-a-life-in-the-impossible/Magic Magazine: The Final Issuehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/5Q02IRvJku4/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magic-magazine-the-final-issue/#respondSun, 13 Nov 2016 18:47:15 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1867One of the reasons this blog has run largely dormant for the past three years is that I’ve been preoccupied with writing for MAGIC Magazine. Beginning in January 2014, I’ve been writing a monthly one-page column called “Walkabout Soup”, about, well, all manner of magic-related things. That was ironically one of the toughest things about it; Stan – …

]]>One of the reasons this blog has run largely dormant for the past three years is that I’ve been preoccupied with writing for MAGIC Magazine. Beginning in January 2014, I’ve been writing a monthly one-page column called “Walkabout Soup”, about, well, all manner of magic-related things.

That was ironically one of the toughest things about it; Stan – the editor – was trusting enough to give me almost completely free editorial reign. Each month I had to run through the mental gauntlet of finding topics that ticked the three sacred boxes of A) things I know about, which B) other people don’t know about, and C) they might actually give a damn about reading about.

Finding topics was actually pretty easy. What wasn’t easy was finding topics that I could translate into 700-750 words of compelling prose. Some topics capped out at 300 words. Others needed a couple of thousand to do them justice. A few of the columns flowed easily into life, but the majority had me figuratively tearing my hair out, trying to find a way to write a page of text worthy of being read by potentially the entire global magic industry.

After 35 months – just one column shy of three full years – my run is ending because the magazine itself is ending. Deciding that 25 years (300 issues exactly) is a nice round number to end on, Stan Allen, creator and editor of Magic Magazine, and all-round wonderful guy, is retiring and moving on to other projects. Most notably, he’ll still be running the incredible MAGIC Live conventions (that linked article being the catalyst for my invitation to write for the magazine in the first place).

It also features my final Walkabout Soup column. At any given moment in the past three years, I would have as many as a dozen half-written columns, each one resisting completion because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work as a complete article. This final one had sat semi-finished for well over a year; a story I really wanted to tell but couldn’t figure out how to.

Well, I finally found a way. It’s a piece of writing I’m very proud of, and I’m glad it will get to be part of the truly remarkable legacy of MAGIC Magazine.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magic-magazine-the-final-issue/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/magic-magazine-the-final-issue/Deep Water at IndyFringehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/6BsqI6sIrGA/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/deepwateratindyfringe/#respondSat, 27 Aug 2016 01:10:35 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1850Dramatic things happened today at the Indianapolis Fringe Festival. I was doing the 6pm performance of my show Alien of Extraordinary Ability while it rained outside. About two thirds of the way through the one-hour show, the room started flooding. It wasn’t a lot of flooding, but the front section of the audience floor was definitely filling up with water. Clearly …

I was doing the 6pm performance of my show Alien of Extraordinary Ability while it rained outside. About two thirds of the way through the one-hour show, the room started flooding. It wasn’t a lot of flooding, but the front section of the audience floor was definitely filling up with water. Clearly it had been raining more heavily than we’d realised.

We paused the show. Was there any danger? Did we need to evacuate? A quick discussion ensued between myself, the audience, and Chelsey the tech manager. Everyone decided that while the water was clearly going to keep filling the room, it was doing it slowly enough that we could finish the show. Some people moved from the deepest flooded area to drier seats at the back. Others stayed right where they were, and just put their feet up on seats to stay dry.

Of all the compliments I’ve received in my career, a collective cry of “Yes, we will sit in progressively deeper water to watch the last third of your show” is definitely one of the more heartfelt ones.

We finished the show. It was hampered by a few flood-related hiccups, but enhanced by many flood-related jokes, both from myself and the audience. By the end, the entire room was ankle-deep in water. As we finished and began the evacuation, some of the audience climbed over chairs to reach the exit, while others removed their shoes and elected to wade.

Thank you to Chelsey for her professionalism, and to the audience for sticking with me to the end! Next time we’ll try for a tornado warning.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/deepwateratindyfringe/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/deepwateratindyfringe/Stardust on The Streethttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/c6BrleMeagY/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/stardust-on-the-street/#respondMon, 11 Jan 2016 21:32:10 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1813Woke up. Yawned. Put on shoes to go and buy milk. Walked to the corner shop on Hollywood Blvd. Found a big crowd blocking the pavement. Wondered what they were there for. Assumed it was some typical blockbuster movie publicity thing. Paused to have a look. RIP David Bowie; 1947 – 2016. It’s funny; big …

Wondered what they were there for. Assumed it was some typical blockbuster movie publicity thing.

Paused to have a look.

RIP David Bowie; 1947 – 2016.

It’s funny; big crowds on Hollywood Blvd are nothing unusual. Every couple of days, I’ll need to skirt around a crush of people that are there for some kind of generic movie premiere, publicity stunt, interview, or other usually-purely-commerce-driven showbiz thing.

Even the star-tiled Walk of Fame itself often feels more like a cynical promotional tool than anything of substance. Obviously it’s a very different experience when you normally walk along it to buy groceries than to go on a celebrity tourist pilgrimage.

But somehow, for a man like David Bowie who featured the themes of stars and space so heavily in his life’s work, and managed to combined a sparkly exterior with a core of thoughtful humanity, the star felt like a stronger emblem than it might for most celebrities.

A little detail that escaped my notice at first in the image above; someone had scattered glitter dust all over the star tile. Somehow it felt appropriate.

I wouldn’t normally have a reason to write about his death, but then I came across the above scene on my morning milk run. It occurred to me that all the people who were deeply touched by Bowie’s life might appreciate knowing that his star on the ground is receiving just as much love as his stars in the sky.

]]>http://www.thingsbysimon.com/stardust-on-the-street/feed/0http://www.thingsbysimon.com/stardust-on-the-street/Last Minute Christmas Theminghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThingsBySimon/~3/M8MHSUtsvxo/
http://www.thingsbysimon.com/last-minute-christmas-theming/#respondMon, 16 Dec 2013 06:48:53 +0000http://www.thingsbysimon.com/?p=1792After the success of Simon and Ghostfunkel at the Variety Collective Halloween Special back in October, Dave Lee and I were invited to do a spot at the VC’s Christmas special. Well, it’s happening two days from now. We have some rough ideas for the set, but as usual with Simon and Davefunkel co-productions, most …

]]>After the success of Simon and Ghostfunkel at the Variety Collective Halloween Special back in October, Dave Lee and I were invited to do a spot at the VC’s Christmas special. Well, it’s happening two days from now. We have some rough ideas for the set, but as usual with Simon and Davefunkel co-productions, most of the planning, preparation, and writing is going to happen on the day.

If you’re interested in seeing how it goes, then come along. To paraphrase Teller (of Penn & Teller fame), if it fails as magic it will at least succeed as comedy.